Tending Tomorrow: Rev. Dr. Joni Sancken & Rev. Aaron Miller
Summary:
In this closing episode of the Tending Tomorrow lecture series, Rev. Dr. Joni Sancken addresses the complex task of preaching in a secular age. Drawing on the insights of philosopher Charles Taylor and her own pastoral and academic experience, Sancken explores how secularism, trauma, and the “buffered self” have reshaped how sermons are heard and what people expect from the pulpit. She challenges preachers to engage the imagination, acknowledge human need, and name God's presence as a spiritual discipline. Sancken reflects on the tension between immanence and transcendence in contemporary preaching, offering practical examples and theological insights rooted in trauma theory, narrative preaching, and her Mennonite background. Rev. Aaron Miller’s thoughtful response pushes the conversation further, urging mainline preachers to risk vulnerability, normalize the “weirdness of God,” and reclaim the sermon as a thin space where divine encounter is still possible—even in a disenchanted world.
Quotables:
“It's not something that you can decide to take on and off like a sweater. Secularism is all of us, and it has necessarily affected preaching on a deep level. Our present secular Canadian context for preaching is rich with possibility and gifts, but preaching amidst contested sources of authority can make it hard for preachers to proclaim with meaning and authenticity and depth. In many churches, powerful claims that lie at the heart of the historic Christian faith are rightly debated. As our broader culture grows increasingly less attuned to the rhythms, narratives, and beliefs that undergird Christianity or any religious beliefs at all. How can preachers preach words that build up and nurture faith while also taking secular culture seriously on its own terms? Can the church preach a word that matters for this disenchanted world that God loves?” - Rev. Dr. Joni Sancken
“Speaking to listeners who desperately long for the good news and moral instruction amidst competing voices, involves creating sermons that open a space where listeners can make choices and where there's enough flexibility for Christ to meet listeners in their own varied humanity.” - Rev. Dr. Joni Sancken
“Theologian Shelly Rambo writes, trauma rolls back the curtains of our assumptions of autonomy, exposing this fleshy insight that we are not immune from the processes of the world, but in fact, profoundly subject to them.” - Rev. Dr. Joni Sancken
“Politics and financial chaos and wars and rumors of wars and environmental catastrophes and spikes in loneliness and anxiety and hopelessness are always before us, and there are realities that the Christian gospel has something to say about. These are spaces in which we are most likely to know that we need a God who can do more than we would ask or imagine.” - Rev. Aaron Miller
“Still, a basic conviction of mine is that the miracle of the mainline church in Canada is that anybody shows up at all. I mean, for most of us, there's no external pressure. There's no social capital attached to church attendance. Because there are easier communities and more efficient means of social engagement and service. And yet, people do come every week across the country, people show up, and I'm convinced that most of them do it because they believe or they hope, implicitly or explicitly, that they will get something that they can only get in church, some glimpse of hope, some possibility that can only be God.” - Rev. Aaron Miller
“For us who are called to preach, that work cannot be separated from our discipleship. It's not something that flows very well from tips and tricks and a whole lot of book learning. Those things can help. But I think congregations want to know that there is something at stake for us in our preaching beyond getting compliments at the door or keeping the complainers quiet, and so we undertake it as a spiritual discipline, a diligent determination to confess how we are experiencing God in this time, in this place or not. Where we're experiencing God's silence because people would rather have our vulnerabilities than our platitudes. And of course, we are insufficient to do all that perfectly. But we're also caught up with the God who is willing and able to do abundantly, far more in us and through us than we can ask or imagine, maybe it be so.” - Rev. Aaron Miller
About Rev. Dr. Joni Sancken
Joni Sancken (PhD, Toronto School of Theology, Emmanuel College) is the Butler Chair of Homiletics and Biblical Interpretation at Vancouver School of Theology. Sancken was previously Professor of Homiletics at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH for the past 10 years and Assistant Professor of Preaching and Practical Theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, VA. Much of her recent work has concerned the intersections of preaching and trauma studies. Her current research is focused on how preaching can support conflict transformation in congregations.
She is the author of several books including, Stumbling Over the Cross: Preaching the Cross and Resurrection Today (Cascade, 2016), Words that Heal: Preaching Hope to Wounded Souls (Abingdon, 2019), All Our Griefs to Bear: Responding with Resilience After Collective Trauma (Herald Press, 2022) and Getting to God: Preaching Good News in a Troubled World (co-authored, Cascade, 2023.)
Sancken is an ordained pastor in Mennonite Church USA and has enjoyed serving and preaching in a wide array of ecumenical settings. She lives in Vancouver with her Presbyterian pastor spouse, Steve Schumm, children Maggie and Teddy, and dogs Bella and Pax. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with family, watching reality competition shows, reading, and exploring the natural beauty in Vancouver.
About Rev. Aaron Miller
Rev. Aaron Miller is a United Church of Canada congregational minister and campus chaplain at the University of British Columbia. He has just begun PhD studies at the Vancouver School of Theology. He lives in Burnaby BC, with his wife and teenage sons.
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Transcript
[John Borthwick]
Welcome. Welcome to the ministry Forum Podcast coming to you from the Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College, where we connect, encourage and resource ministry leaders all across Canada as they seek to thrive in their passion to share the gospel.
I am your host, the Reverend John Borthwick, Director of the Center and curator of all that is ministryforum.ca. I absolutely love that I get to do what I get to do, and most of all that, I get to share it all with all of you. So thanks for taking the time out of your day to give us a listen. Whether you're a seasoned ministry leader or just beginning your journey, this podcast is made with you in mind.
Welcome, welcome to the ministry Forum Podcast, and today, we wrap up the Klempa lectureship series with our fourth and final episode. If you've stumbled onto this one and haven't listened to the earlier three episodes, we'd encourage you to go back and do so. This lecture series entitled “Tending Tomorrow; Canadian women homileticians reflect on the future of preaching in Canada” was a collaboration between the ministry Forum and the reforming preaching initiative led by the Reverend Dr Sarah Travis of Knox College. Our final lecturer is the Reverend Dr Joni Sanken.
The Reverend Dr Joni Sanken is the butler Chair of homiletics and biblical interpretation at Vancouver School of Theology. Sanken was previously professor of homiletics at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. For the past 10 years, an assistant professor of preaching and practical Theology at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisburg, Virginia. Much of her recent work has concerned the intersections of preaching and trauma studies. Her current research is focused on how preaching can support conflict transformation in congregations. She's the author of several books, including “Stumbling over the cross; preaching the Cross and Resurrection today” published in 2016, “Words that heal; Preaching hope to wounded souls” published in 2019, “All our griefs to bear; Responding with resilience after collective trauma,” published in 2022 and “Getting to God; Preaching good news in a troubled world,” co-authored in 2023 Sanken is an ordained pastor of the Mennonite Church USA, and has enjoyed serving and preaching in a wide variety of ecumenical settings. She lives in Vancouver with her Presbyterian pastor spouse, Steve Schoem. Children, Maggie and Teddy and dogs, Bella and Pax. In her free time, she enjoys spending time with family, watching reality competition shows, reading and exploring the natural beauty in Vancouver. Let us listen to Joni.
[Joni Sancken]
Thank you for sticking with us till the later afternoon time. I was just telling John that this is a time of day when, sadly, I have taught several preaching classes, and I finally have convinced the registrar at VST that we need to have our preaching classes in the morning, because it's really sad when students fall asleep during each other's sermons, even though perhaps it does prepare them for congregational ministry.
Anyway, it's a delight to be with you, and I'm so grateful to Knox for the wonderful hospitality, especially John, looking after so many details, and Sarah for having conceived of this event. And then, of course, Sarah and Hiran my homiletical sisters for your deep wisdom and insights today. Thank you.
Back in the May of 2019, a record setting, 18 tornadoes, hit the town where my family and I lived at that time, near Dayton, Ohio. An EF four tornado with estimated wind speeds of about 275 kilometers an hour causes significant damage in this area. It was right around the Seminary where I taught. In the aftermath, a pastor I know posted on social media something along the lines of, “God isn't playing around Dayton. Listen up. God is speaking.” The following Sunday, this pastor preached a fiery sermon linking the tornado with other events in our world to the End Times, urging listeners to get right with God before it was too late. Positively, the same pastor also posted on social media in the days following the tornadoes about various relief and cleanup efforts, also ascribing these events to the hand of God. Now, this pastor could be right. God could have caused these tornadoes. However, climatologists also explain that tornadoes are caused by things like moisture, atmospheric heat and wind shear. Further, there have been increasing discussions about how human caused climate change may be playing a role in extreme weather events like this. Certainly, humans are behind local environmental changes caused by increased urbanization and population density. Tornadoes are way more destructive when they hit an urban area than when they hit open farmland. I confess to finding the climatologist explanation more credible in this instant. And to be completely honest, I can't think of a person that I know in my new hometown of Vancouver who would ever attribute a tornado and its aftermath to the hand of God?
However, I can understand the impulse that led the pastor to make this claim. As a person of faith, I fear the hollowness of a world where terrible things just happen, where suffering and blessing are reduced to luck and random choices. And I find comfort and scriptural promises that God is ultimately in charge of the forces at play in our world, and that God oversees all life with intentionality. I believe the words of the spiritual, “He's got the whole world in His hands. He's got the wind and the rain in his hands.” At one time, our world was dripping with connections to the transcendent, even amidst competing divisions and struggles about faith, flat out unbelief was rare. Attributing events such as natural disasters and neighborly behavior to the hand of God was relatively common, and one need not look so far back in history to hear stories about how people prayed that my God might send rain to end a drought, or how God punished people through a hurricane or a military loss.
Today, such comments are extremely rare, reflecting shifting cultural norms around what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls “conditions for belief and sources of ultimate authority,” hallmarks of our secular age. Lest we think we're talking about something separate from ministry or life in the church, secularism is not something that is out there. It's not something that you can decide to take on and off like a sweater. Secularism is all of us, and it has necessarily affected preaching on a deep level. Our present secular Canadian context for preaching is rich with possibility and gifts, but preaching amidst contested sources of authority can make it hard for preachers to proclaim with meaning and authenticity and depth. In many churches, powerful claims that lie at the heart of the historic Christian faith are rightly debated. As our broader culture grows increasingly less attuned to the rhythms, narratives, and beliefs that undergird Christianity or any religious beliefs at all. How can preachers preach words that build up and nurture faith while also taking secular culture seriously on its own terms? Can the church preach a word that matters for this disenchanted world that God loves?
I'm going to speak about several aspects of Taylor's descriptions around secularism that can create challenges for preachers in talking about God.
1. The first is the privatizing of our faith. References to God or any ultimate reality beyond the here and now are largely absent in public spaces in Canada today, most of us go to work, walk the dog, attend concerts, watch hockey, knit sweaters, invest for retirement, all without necessarily referring to God or any religious beliefs at all. Secularism in these diverse spheres of our lives can be wonderful, and that allows believers to exercise an act of faith, while also allowing people of different religions and those who ascribed no religion at all to live together in relative peace. But this tidy separation of arenas where we do talk about our faith and expect to encounter God in places where we may bracket out our beliefs, creates a challenge for preachers. It can be difficult to find meaningful connections between scripture and the traditions of the church and the everyday lives of secular sermon listeners. It can be challenging to talk about God's presence and places where we don't expect to acknowledge God. In addition to the privatization of faith, Charles Taylor also highlights differences in how we make meaning with many of our theological forebearers or figures in the biblical text. We live in a disenchanted world where meaning is made largely internally, without any sense of reference to transcendence. Belief tends to be individual rather than communal, and there's a collapsed sense of the ultimate good, marked by a lack of tension between the highest Christian calling and normal life. Time itself and our broader understanding of the cosmos has been distilled into a natural process that unfolds on its own, without mystery. These attributes affect preaching deeply, from the ways that we explore scripture to the theological shape of the sermon, to the stories and examples we choose to use. Premodern people lived in a world where certain objects might be charged with possibilities a religious relic could cure illness. A person could be overtaken or troubled by demons or positively entered by the Holy Spirit or actively moved by the presence of God. Today, people consider themselves more insulated internally and more autonomous. We have a greater sense of our own agency. In mainline worship services across Canada, sermons generally address a natural world understood through natural trackable processes, rather than a supernatural world where external forces beyond our conscious awareness affect us. Taylor refers to this as having a buffered self. The buffered self can be a challenge for preachers because it can limit our expectations for encountering God. Listeners may miss an opportunity to experience the biblical text or an event in our world in a new way because it's difficult for them to release their sense of control or autonomy. The buffered self can make us oblivious to recognizing God's hand in our world. To engage this challenge and find possibility in the experiences of the buffered self, preachers can focus on human need in preaching. Human need pulls back the veil of control and autonomy. Getting in touch with our need can help us recognize our inability and our finitude.
a. Here's an example of the dynamics of the buffered self and human need when interpreting scripture for preaching. Preaching on Jesus, calming the storm is a common pericope for students in my intro preaching classes. It shows up in Matthew Mark and Luke. In the text, we find Jesus and the disciples crossing the sea and the boat a sudden fierce storm comes up, and they are in mortal peril while Jesus sleeps, when the disciples finally managed to rouse Jesus, the text speaks clearly of Jesus having control over the Natural World, stopping the fierce winds and calming the intense waves that were threatening the boat. The pericope ends with Jesus questioning the faith of the disciples while they cower in fear at the immense power he has just shown over nature. The preaching students faithfully unpack this biblical story, often with vivid details of the storm, sometimes with research about weather systems in the Sea of Galilee and the shape of boats in the biblical era, they go to great lengths to validate the danger the disciples are in. But when they make their interpretive move to connect this text to our world, they do so from the vantage of the buffered self, with a focus on imminent issues that many in their congregations may also be facing. Without exception, the storm in the text, which is an actual weather event, becomes a metaphorical storm in our world, relationship storms, financial storms, the Storm of a serious health crisis, or, more recently, political storms, both here in Canada and South of the border, These are all perilous situations that absolutely need the peace and presence of Jesus, but we risk losing that sense of awe and fear that the disciples had because a transcendent Jesus had control over the wind and the waves. The storms become mediated through our buffered selves and a focus on imminent challenges. And Jesus's power is less of an external force and more of a feeling.
b. For example, the relational storm with a family member is calmed by Jesus through a counseling session or a meaningful conversation. Our buffered sense of personhood and focus on the imminent domain may inadvertently limit us. It can be hard to be open to some accounts of divine connection and transcendent mystery in the presence of deep need.
I have permission to share this story with you. My sister was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder as a young adolescent, it took many years and experimenting with a wide range of medications and treatments for her to find a place of equilibrium. Remembering those difficult early years of my sister's illness, my mom remembers one incident as a touchstone. Despite her medication and mental health care, one weekend, my sister was very agitated and unable to rest because she felt certain that demons would harm her or others in our family if she would sleep. At the end of her rope, my mom finally knelt beside her bed and prayed aloud that Jesus would come and banish the demons and protect my sister and our family. My sister relaxed, her breathing calmed, and she fell asleep. Now, my sister has a diagnosed mental illness. She receives mental health care, and she takes medications. But even with this, there is additional space to acknowledge a kind of spiritual permeability that can open our lives to the healing presence of God. Sermons can help to normalize our need before God and our inability to understand all things. There can be strength in acknowledging the mysterious power of God in preaching. For those who are open to transcendence, we understand that which is good at least partly in relationship to that which is divine or ultimate. This is deeply ingrained in Christianity, but there are examples in other settings too, such as recognizing reliance on a higher power to achieve sobriety in AA, or terrifyingly for some Americans, seeing the history of the United States through a lens of manifest destiny that names a transcendent God's hand and the calling and activity of a nation state, even when it acts in ways that harm others.
In the church, we acknowledge a kind of push-pull relationship between eminence and transcendence. In a disenchanted world, where do we place the horizon that orients life and decision making? We may see God as creator, the one who wills all life of on Earth and a generalized giver of good gifts, but we may not recognize or regularly notice or name God as active and engaged in our world. If we're looking at it theologically, some would name this as problematic, but it unfolds practically Sunday by Sunday in many of our churches. Drained of a connection to the transcendence of God, much of our faith comes down to morality and human ethics. In work I've done around the intersections of preaching and trauma theory, group after group of pastors generally agree that it is easier to preach about tragic events than miraculous ones, because trauma and brokenness seems so much more common. They're so close at hand. The proof is right in front of us. Here stand devastated neighborhoods here are the open graves. On the other hand, miracles exist outside our understanding of natural order. Many of us struggle with how to integrate positive experiences of the miraculous. Taylor poetically describes miracles as a kind of punctual hole blown in the regular order of things from the outside that is from the transcendent. Practically, the way that this unfolds in my preaching classes is that every time a student tells a story that borders on miracle, I remind them that they need to also honor and validate those who don't have this kind of experience, whose prayers go unanswered, who wonders why my child wasn't healed, why my dad didn't get an unexpected job offer, but I also struggle with it. This is just a small part of how a loss of connection to transcendence has impacted preaching.
As awareness of transcendence has waned, the imminent frame of existence has swelled, and with it comes an enhanced view of human agency in our world. Preachers certainly don't deny God's presence, but in many contexts, preaching focuses mostly on people, biblical people and people today. In some settings, this focus on people is also coupled with a call to action, because the transcendent sphere is so marginal, and our focus on life is here and now, preachers tend to elevate human potential to meet human need. This quote from Teresa of Avila is a favorite among many preachers,
“Christ has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands. Yours are the feet. Yours are the eyes. You are his body. Christ has no body now on Earth, but yours.”
And of course, this powerful quote is true, as Christ's body is the church, but when it's used with a primarily humanistic framework to end a sermon, it doesn't always feel like good news.
Taylor also describes anthropocentric shifts that have invited a more humanistic turn in congregations. The first involves a focus on discipline and holy living that was associated with renewal and Western Christianity. Christianity ordered life in medieval Christendom, but in Taylor's words, people lived their faith at different speeds. There could be quite a spread between a monk on one end and a field laborer on the other. Read through Taylor's lenses, the Reformation sought to level life collapsing the distance between the sacred and the profane. Ordinary people were expected to live out their Christian vocations for the glory of God, everyone now needs to satisfy all the demands of the gospel and effectively live out their vocations. It's the priesthood of all believers. As the spotlight focused on how Christians were called to live in light of the gospel, God as a primary actor, receded into the shadows. Believers inadvertently began to exchange God's primary activity for the secondary responses of people without a sense of the ultimate or the transcendent, the arena of focus becomes purely human, creaturely, flourishing, and this goal seems attainable, and it can become difficult then to understand what grace is and why it's needed.
So, we profess belief in God, but we may live or preach as if God is not active in our world. Preaching in this vein may fail then to build up a need for God, or if a need is expressed, then it's met with a response or a call for human action with these challenges in mind, there are also many opportunities for preachers related to secularism. With a focus on human potential, human fallenness or sin is often neglected or focused inwardly in a highly personal or therapeutic approach preaching that names human sin or brokenness clearly may show us one of the clearest paths for talking about God and humanist context. When people are in touch with their finitude, they are more open to experiences that point beyond the limits of human potential toward Divine Presence. Preaching in a disenchanted world means giving attention to the thought processes and experiences of listeners. Secular sermon listeners come to church but are in relationship with many people who hold a wide variety of beliefs. They're used to navigating diversity by keeping their belief private. Secular listeners are buffered selves. They are largely closed off from the influence of spiritual forces, whether they be divine or demonic in nature. However, the imagination may serve as a generative path to help buffered listeners experience connection to God.
The new homiletic was a movement that emerged in the middle of the 20th century. It continues to shape and propel preaching. It was forged in part, out of a dynamic engagement with preaching in the late modern and secular context that involved a turn toward the needs of listeners; including involving imaginations of listeners as active agents in the preaching moment. Many of the shifts that have happened in approaches to preaching since the 1950s have been concerned with engaging the listener, casting preaching as an event where the text is immediately relevant to the present, allows listeners to experience the gospel for themselves, rather than relying mainly on evidence that's named by the preacher. Narrative was emphasized as a powerful tool for structuring the whole sermon and for inviting listeners to participate in meaning-making. People make sense of their lives and experiences through story. I've often watched my own children engaging in narrative play, where they process something that happened in their lives. Sharing a personal story in a sermon can create a sense of relational connection and perceived intimacy. My own recent work on preaching and trauma names story as an important way in which preachers can show care and sensitivity and nurture resilience. Stories can help listeners with meaning-making, identity, and purpose in the aftermath of trauma. We can also offer information to help listeners have agency in how they engage with a sermon. For example, if a story may be sensitive to listeners, a preacher can offer a trigger warning, which restores agency to survivors and acknowledges the autonomy of listeners. Because our disenchanted age is also an age with contested sources of authority, the preacher's voice joins many others in vying to engage with listeners. Preachers today are faced with navigating a fine balance. Speaking to listeners who desperately long for the good news and moral instruction amidst competing voices, involves creating sermons that open a space where listeners can make choices and where there's enough flexibility for Christ to meet listeners in their own varied humanity. Many people have also moved from a default setting of belief in a transcendent God, to the possibility of making sense of the world within themselves, potentially apart from God. This infuses events that happen in our world with a greater sense of importance. We move from hope that. Lies in the glories of transcendence to a hope that lies mainly in a transformed world. We see this reflected in preaching that focuses on our world that calls us to hope in ethical choices based on greater good being done by people here and now. The good news is that we don't have to bifurcate the actions of God into transcendence versus eminence, we can preach both. By talking about God working through people as active in this imminent frame, we open pathways to transcendence. To return to the earlier example of preaching about Jesus calming the storm, there is nothing wrong with a metaphorical take on storms. But the sermon could also highlight the transcendence lifted up in the text that Jesus's power was terrifying, lest we miss the chance to open ourselves up to divine mystery.
As I mentioned before, much of my recent research has involved a deep dive into the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies. The word trauma means wound, and while this word is increasingly used in a wide variety of ways and in many settings, trauma is a technical term for the comprehensive responses of individual and collective bodies to life threatening, broadly understood, events or an ongoing situation that exceeds our ability to process it. It is an experience of comprehensive and destructive overwhelm that leaves no part of existence untouched. Trauma responses impact us, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally and in a broad sociological and collective ways, as well. Theologian Shelly Rambo writes, trauma rolls back the curtains of our assumptions of autonomy, exposing this fleshy insight that we are not immune from the processes of the world, but in fact, profoundly subject to them. In the wake of trauma, our buffered selves dissolve natural processes, and the imminent frame no longer makes sense, and naming God can seem almost impossible. We are now living in a time when many are experiencing the ramifications of traumatic experience injustices and inequality deepen experiences of corrosive stress here in Canada, traumatic wounds around the ongoing legacy of colonialism, loss of indigenous life and culture and the residential school system have generated pain and brokenness that demands a response from our theology and our God talk, including preaching. Where I Live In BC, the horrific discovery of graves at the site of the Kamloops residential school has created a local focal point for the pain. amidst these crises, church leaders have faithfully blazed new trails and ministry, have embraced technology and new ways and continue to tackle ever changing needs in worship and caregiving, all while managing their own anxiety, grief, rage and faith.
The situations that we face may feel unprecedented, but they are deeply resonant with the heart of the Christian gospel. Our God knows what it's like to lose a child, to watch his own beloved gasp his final breath in a public lynching designed to humiliate and terrorize. Our God and Jesus has also traveled the way of suffering, death and loss. Jesus absorbed, deactivated, and ultimately defeated all of the forces that destroy creaturely flourishing. The crucified and risen one draws near to us even now during times of deep stress, God generates new and creative ways to break through the fear and the pain, to connect to us even as we struggle to talk about God in challenging times, connecting to God through ancient practices, symbols and ideas can bring comfort and strength. The Celtic theological concept of thin places may offer a fruitful way to describe God's presence with us. Thin places refer to geographic locations where people feel closer to the divine. The distance between heaven and earth, between God and people, seems to be shorter. In keeping with our disenchanted age, some suggest that the experience of thin places have to do more with us, or our perceptions, than with God actually being more present in some places than others. Speaker and author Eric Weiner writes that travel to thin places disorients and confuses. When we are out of our usual routine, we may stumble upon a thin place. Places become thin to us when we are vulnerable and open to God, when we set aside our pretense of control. Weiner writes, “If God, however defined, is everywhere and every when, as members of the Australian Indigenous community put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn't the whole world thin? Maybe it's because we're too thick to recognize it.” Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven, but of earth as it really is, unencumbered and unmasked. God comes to us in both expected and unexpected ways. God meets us in the wide variety of local communities and admits challenges that we may face in trying to name God's presence. The sermon represents a potential, thin place where the distance between God and our lives can become closer, and where we may experience a transformative encounter.
Our perceptions, cultures, limitations and needs mediate our experiences of God's active presence in our world, while God meets us and our vulnerability. The dynamic between the human and the divine is intrinsic to preaching. It can feel inscrutable to our secular selves with a maddening lack of clarity, especially when it comes to the pressing call to name God's presence in our world. Preachers do face significant challenges, brokenness, suffering, pain, loss, tragedy and injustice lay bare human finitude and sin. At times, these experiences can contribute to a thin place where people meet God, but these experiences can also make it hard for us to see where God is working in our world, as we get bogged down by our own limitations and grief. In their recent work the “Power of Bad,” social scientists, John Tierney and Roy Baumeister explain the weight that negative events or experiences have in people's lives. Tierney and Baumeister posit that we need many, many, many more good things or good experiences to balance the power of even one negative experience. Many of us can attest to this in minor and significant ways, one criticism can overrule a dozen compliments, and sadly, one traumatic childhood event can often haunt an entire life. In our preaching, the negativity effect takes hold when we name trouble and sin and brokenness and we are Not able to offer examples of good news to leave listeners with a sense of hope. When preachers are discerning God's action in our world, they also experience the negativity effect, which makes it difficult to see God's action in our world as tipping the scale toward hope. There tends to be a sense that truly good news is a scarce commodity, and incidents of God's action are truly rare, powerful claims and sermons are often not backed up with specifics. Some stories of God's actions circulate on the internet and find life in many sermons. God is magnified by this witness, but there are so many more stories of God to be proclaimed. The negativity effect can blind us to the abundance of God's presence.
Focusing one's preaching on naming God's presence, clearly in our world, is an act of confession, a spiritual discipline that requires practice and patience like other spiritual disciplines. People can enter into this discipline by looking at the world through deliberately God colored lenses. In times such as these, it would be unbearable to have to look at the world without God colored lenses. Indeed, part of the Ministry of pastors is to look for God and then to bear witness by naming these divine sightings in the sermon. Submitting to this sermonic discipline can be life changing for preachers, as well as those who hear sermons, some recent interactions with a couple of pastors I know who are suffering from advanced cancer have hit this home, even during their painful treatment, suffering and dire prognosis, these pastors continue to see and name God's presence through the pulpits of their written emails and reflections, they continue to bear witness to the God who meets them in their deepest need.
The deeper the trouble, the stronger the experience of the active presence and power of Christ. When one looks for God, one finds God everywhere, and when one finds God, they can point the way to others. Seeking, finding and naming, the presence of God not only changes our spiritual outlook, but it also changes everything else, from the neural pathways of our brains to the buoyancy of our souls, increasing our experiences of hope and building resilience. I know I'm right here at time, I'm going to close with a poem for you in traditional sermon fashion, at the points in a poem. I'm going to close with this poem, Miracle by Seamus Heaney, which serves as a companion and reflection on Jesus's miraculous healing of the paralyzed man carried to Jesus by his friends and three of the four Gospels. I think the poem shows something of what it means to do hope and hold faith for one another in a suffering and secular world, it bears witness to the miracle of healing, for sure, but also to the incremental and imminent miracles of friendship, self, giving and persistent love. Here is Miracle by Seamus Heaney, “not the one who takes up his bed and walks, but the ones who have known him all along and carry him in their shoulders, numb the ache and stoop deep locked in their backs the stretcher handles slippery with sweat and no let up until he's strapped on tight, made tiltable and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing. Be mindful of them as they stand and wait for the burn of the paid-out ropes to cool their slight lightheadedness and incredulity to pass those who've known him all along.”
[John Borthwick]
And finally, Dr Sancken’s, respondent is the Reverend Aaron Miller. Erin was ordained in 2010 in Hamilton Conference of the United Church of Canada. Aaron served at Faith Centennial United Church in the village of Selkirk, Ontario, from 2009 until he was called to ministry at university Hill in 2016 enjoys the peculiar location of U Hill on the UBC campus, knowing that the peculiarities of campus life pose interesting challenges for preaching and living the gospel. Aaron also enjoys the opportunity to interact and work with the students and faculty at the Vancouver School of Theology. He's also a student in the PhD program, jointly administered by VST and the University of Pretoria. He and his wife of 12 years live on campus with their two sons, and while they sometimes miss the wide-open space of rural Ontario life, they have come to love having Pacific spirit Park as their backyard. Let's listen to Aaron.
[Aaron Miller]
Hi, my name is Aaron Miller. I'm a United Church of Canada Minister serving a congregation in Vancouver, BC. I'm also a PhD student at the Vancouver School of Theology, and I'm really grateful to be part of this conversation. I'm also really grateful that someone like Dr Sanken, with such a deep pastoral heart, is engaged in forming the next generation of particularly mainline preachers in Canada. I've long appreciated Joni's willingness to wrestle with the intersection of our contexts and our theologies with the challenges of naming God, of pointing to God's provision and goodness and redemption within a broader culture that is often somewhere in the range of indifferent to hostile, to the claims of Christian faith. And I'm even more grateful for her insistence that it is both possible and necessary to get to God in our preaching, for the sake of the church and for the world. In this talk, I'm grateful for Joni’s distillation of Charles Taylor's work in a secular age, as it pertains to preaching across Canadian contexts, unquestionably the challenges of the imminent frame and the buffered self and the nearly unavoidable secularity of the church in the 21st century are issues for those of us who stand in the pulpit week over week and try to give voice to the wonder of God and the hope of the gospel. I'm reminded of Carl Barth's quip that the one thing a preacher should feel when they stand in the pulpit is insufficiency. With Taylor's insights in the background, our challenge is not only bearing witness to the one who is frustratingly avoidant of our convenient categories, but also overcoming the avoidance of so many in our congregations, who would rather God stay at a safe and heavenly distance while we sort out the earthly details, or who think that God ought to act in a way that God clearly is not, or who are actively wondering if there can even be a God given the current state of things. There are some weeks when feeling just insufficient would be kind of a relief.
I think the challenge is particularly acute in the mainline church. Alicia Kaufman, in her book “The Christian Century and the Rrise of the Protestant Mainline,” outlines the split between mainline and more evangelical or charismatic expressions of Christian faith early in the 20th century. Although she's addressing an American context, what she describes is painfully familiar. She demonstrates that the mainline impulse was to position ourselves as credible within a secular culture and especially within a Western academic framework, prizing reason over experience and the tangible or the scientific over the spiritual. The outworking of that decision over generations has meant that it is an increasing challenge for mainline preachers to offer anything that does not conform to the modern secular worldview. It's more important to affirm evolution than resurrection or to vote for the right political party than to actively pursue the kingdom of God through prayer and discernment and the power of the Holy Spirit. Of course, these things are not mutually exclusive, but if we have to pick one, we're more likely to err on the side of what is most appropriate for a thinking Canadian.
I appreciate Joni's reflections on the challenges that face her students when preaching the story like Jesus calming the storm. For many, it's all but impossible to treat that as anything other than an allegory, because that sort of thing just doesn't happen. Forget the fact that the disciples also knew that that sort of thing doesn't happen, and that's why they're terrified. But maybe that's actually part of it. Right, we would rather God be around to comfort us to be a shelter in the storms of life, but we are less keen on the Word made flesh, demonstrating the divine control and authority over the weather. Because that would be terrifying. And if, if God can dictate the weather, we are left with questions about what's going on when tornados strike, or rivers flood, or earthquakes split the Earth. It's just easier if God sticks to the vaguely spiritual and lets us explain the world.
I recall a friend of mine last summer in the midst of the forest fires that ravaged Alberta and BC remarking that it would be almost shocking to hear someone in a mainline church actively praying for rain. We were okay praying for the safety of firefighters and for the comfort of those affected. But what if we prayed for rain and got it? And yet, Joni is absolutely right to note that our tragedies and traumas, the hard stuff of life, not to mention our own sin, are places where the veil of our autonomy and self-sufficiency is pulled back, where our explanations fall short and we yearn for more. It's not hard these days to come up with ways in which we are decidedly not in control, and where we are deeply needy. Politics and financial chaos and wars and rumors of wars and environmental catastrophes and spikes in loneliness and anxiety and hopelessness are always before us, and there are realities that the Christian gospel has something to say about. These are spaces in which we are most likely to know that we need a God who can do more than we would ask or imagine. I do wonder, though, how a secular age will age, given the surreal state of things at the moment, the general failure of modern Western exceptionalism and the increasingly flimsy assumptions that we are on an ever upward trend, not, of course, the upward call of Christ, but the confidence that we with ingenuity and pluck and the best of Western ethics, will get this world sorted out eventually. And most of my work is on the campus of the University of British Columbia, and among students, there's this kind of pervasive skepticism about things that were taken for granted not too long ago. And I can't help but wonder if the generations have come who are coming of age in the next decade or two won't be much more open to the hope and promise of a God who is truly at work in the world, determined to draw us and all things towards that world as it will be when God gets the world that God wants. I can't help but wonder if the option of discipleship to Jesus might not prove more appealing than whatever else is on offer. Obviously, that remains largely to be seen, but I think preachers should be on the lookout for it. It's also worth noting that as authoritative and applicable as Taylor's work is to many Western contexts, it would still be incoherent in other places around the globe, the challenges of preaching to largely European descended congregations, which is most mainline churches in Canada, are not the same as preaching in other contexts. Still, a basic conviction of mine is that the miracle of the mainline church in Canada is that anybody shows up at all. I mean, for most of us, there's no external pressure. There's no social capital attached to church attendance. Because there are easier communities and more efficient means of social engagement and service. And yet, people do come every week across the country, people show up, and I'm convinced that most of them do it because they believe or they hope, implicitly or explicitly, that they will get something that they can only get in church, some glimpse of hope, some possibility that can only be God. And so we might as well give it to them.
I appreciate that image of the sermon as a thin space where we might experience a bit of that “more” that our hearts long for. And I think the challenge for preachers is to allow for it, which is risky, because then we have to wade into territory where we are not comfortable, where our Greek will not help us, and the commentaries cannot save us, where we might also have to admit that “I don't know,” is a perfectly legitimate theological answer. Perhaps our reticence to do so has to do with the fact that in many contexts, the sermon is often treated as an island in worship, a place of security and confidence, where the preacher will explain the gospel to us. It's part of a church service, but it's not always clear that it's in the service of worship. I remember early on in my ministry at university Hill in Vancouver, I got an email from a parishioner whom I trust. He is wise and he's supportive, and in this particular email, he told me that he generally enjoys my preaching, that my theology and my writing, my presentation, were all pretty good. The only problem was that my sermons tended to end before God was about to speak. My sermons were about to end just before God was about to speak, after I got over the gut shot of that, I realized that any pain was not so much from what he'd said as that he was right. I had just moved from a small, rural church where on any given Sunday I was the most educated person in the room, not by any means the smartest, but I'd spent more years in school than most of them, but here a whole lot of people would have to not show up for me to be the most educated person in the room, and I had followed a beloved pastor who was widely regarded as a great preacher. I was trying to prove that I could hack it. I was trying to show how clever I am, how good my theology is. I was trying to explain God to these people, which is almost always boring in the end. It's not what most people want out of worship. For one thing, it is hard to worship a God whose ways and thoughts are far beyond ours. And if that God, gets whittled down to a size that the preacher can manage, that's one reason why Joni's insistence on storytelling as part of preaching is so important. Because stories are disarming. They're slippery, they're hard to pin down with good reason and good doctrine, and they allow us to tell about the weird stuff, right, the stuff that brings us alongside the father in Scripture who cries out, “I believe, help my unbelief,” or the recently blind man who can only tell the authorities, “I don't know much about Jesus. What I do know is I was blind, and now I see.” That's where the good stuff is.
I often tell my congregation to share their weird God stories with one another, because most people sitting in most churches have at least one like, let's normalize the weirdness of God. Part of preaching is teaching by example how we can articulate a living faith, a faith being worked out in the world, which means letting the weirdness of God and the presumed predictability of the world collide. It means for an hour a week, 10 to 20 minutes of preaching in most mainline churches, relentlessly allowing God to be the active agent, not just in our little lives though there, of course, but in the entire cosmos. That can open up space for us to keep our eyes on what is possible in the company of Jesus, not just what's probable when we're left to our own devices.
I want to finish with gratitude for Joni's naming that naming God's presence, clearly in our world, is an act of confession, a spiritual discipline that requires. Practice and patience. For us who are called to preach, that work cannot be separated from our discipleship. It's not something that flows very well from tips and tricks and a whole lot of book learning. Those things can help. But I think congregations want to know that there is something at stake for us in our preaching beyond getting compliments at the door or keeping the complainers quiet, and so we undertake it as a spiritual discipline, a diligent determination to confess how we are experiencing God in this time, in this place or not. Where we're experiencing God's silence because people would rather have our vulnerabilities than our platitudes. And of course, we are insufficient to do all that perfectly. But we're also caught up with the God who is willing and able to do abundantly, far more in us and through us than we can ask or imagine, maybe it be so.
[John Borthwick]
That concludes our 2025 Lois Klempa Memorial lectureship. We hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as we enjoyed experiencing it way back in March. And this is also the last episode of season three of the ministry Forum Podcast. We'll be back in the fall. Look for us to return with many more amazing guests, clever cross casts and interesting recasts, just like this lecture series.
The Center for Lifelong Learning at Knox College, through ministry forum is furthering the mission of the college to enliven ministry leaders, to think deeply, live authentically and lead courageously. We want to ensure that no ministry leader feels alone as they answer the calling to serve. Thank you so very much for your support and joining us this year. If you like todays and other episodes of the ministry Forum Podcast, you know what to do…
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Enjoy your summer. May you find time for rest and rejuvenation. Wreath a little pause some, read some do a little just be a lot and most of all, have fun and be at peace. We'll talk soon.